Wibbly Wobbly
by ficlicious
Summary: YAHF. Xander wears pinstripes.
1. Prologue: Halloween, Part 1

Prologue: Halloween

**Genre**: Dramady, YAHF.  
**Word Count**: ~600  
**Warnings**: Familiarity with Tenth Doctor, and through to "Halloween", Season 2 of Buffy.  
**Disclaimer**: I do not own Scooby, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who, or David Tennant, though I'd very much like to. I am not profiting financially from this bit of silliness.

_Halloween, 1997_

The Doctor blinked, and he was somewhere else. It wasn't like he wasn't used to blinking and being somewhere else; that rather came par for the course in his life. Normally, though, blinking and being somewhere else involved Jack Harkness, unexplained time vortices, or the whims of the TARDIS.

There were no swirling lights, omnisexual men or bright blue boxes anywhere in sight.

There were, however, any manner of small aliens running rampant around the streets, chasing the humans who were fleeing in terror. The Doctor frowned. This sort of thing didn't normally happen until Christmas time, and usually in London. It didn't look like Christmas and it certainly didn't feel like London.

"Xander! It's me, Willow!"

Muscle memory made the Doctor turn to see a redheaded girl in skimpy clothing rushing towards him. "'Allo," he said, and blinked, feeling his throat. His voice was different. Had he regenerated? No, that couldn't be. He would have remembered regenerating. Or would he have? Was that the sort of man he was now, an amnesiac? All signs certainly pointed that way. He checked his hands, patted down his front, and pushed his fingers through thick curls of indeterminate color.

"Blimey, I _have_ regenerated. How, _when_, did that happen?"

The girl screeched to a halt, blinking in astonishment. "What?"

He turned to the girl. Lovely thing, ginger to boot. He could regenerate a thousand times, well… ten, and never quite manage that shade of red. Or any shade of red. It was enough to depress him. Momentarily, anyway. "Don't suppose I'm ginger, am I? Ah, no matter. As I was saying, hello there. Tell me, miss, whereabouts in the galaxy are we? Date and time, year and place would be brilliant. Planet of origin, perhaps?"

"Xander, quit messing around. This isn't no time for jokes!"

He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. "Oh I never joke, miss. Not once have I cracked a joke in the face of the unknown. A riddle, maybe. A pun, oh yes, certainly. Anecdotes, a witticism here or there. I banter quite frequently, of course, and have been known to even engage in a small bit of buffoonery from time to time. But joke?" He shook his head. "Never."

Willow stared at him like he was insane, but the Doctor was long used to those sorts of looks. She shook her head, waving her hands. "Something crazy is happening. I was dressed as a ghost for Halloween, and now I am a ghost. And you were dressed as a …" She frowned, taking in the pinstripe suit and blue Converse. "What are you supposed to be, anyway?"

He grinned. "I, my dear, ginger ghost, am the Doctor."

"Doctor who?" She winced and shook her head again, hands waving frantically. "Never mind. Don't answer that. Listen, Doctor… There's something seriously wrong."

"There usually is, Willow. Let me see…" He paced forward, peering at the buildings, letting his gaze slip into the timestream for just a second. "Hm. Sunnydale. United States of America. Planet Earth. Late nineties. Nineteen nineties at that." He sniffed and licked his tongue into the air, even went so far as to pick up a pinch of dirt from the asphalt and taste it. "October. Halloween. A hint of chaos magic on the air." He grinned. "Haven't seen chaos magic in _years_. That's brilliant!"

Willow just gaped at him.


	2. Halloween, continued

**Genre**: Dramady, YAHF.  
**Word Count**: ~2000  
**Warnings**: Familiarity with Tenth Doctor, and through to "Halloween", Season 2 of Buffy.  
**Disclaimer**: I do not own Scooby, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who, or David Tennant, though I'd very much like to. I am not profiting financially from this bit of silliness. I have included certain lines of dialogue from both Buffy and Doctor Who, notably the aforementioned "Halloween" episode of BTVS and "The Christmas Invasion" of Doctor Who, as well as one particular line between the Fourth and Fifth incarnations.  
**Author's Note**: I'm not 100% sure I'm happy with this part. It seems to be lacking something.

_Streets of Sunnydale_

"So! We have an unknown chaos magician running around, turning things upside down. Kids in costumes have become their costumes. _Right._ Yes. Well." The Doctor clapped his hands and rubbed them together, looking around intently. "First things first. Is there any _tea_ in this town?"

Willow wasn't at all sure what Xander had dressed in. She didn't remember any manic, cheery-in-the-face-of-certain-death TV actors or comic book characters in his admittedly wide repertoire, but he was the comic book geek, not her. Life was way too surreal without adding fiction to it. She tended to stick to Oprah's book club in her reading habits, just to get a taste of what normalcy was supposed to be like. "You want… tea?"

"What, superheated infusion of free radicals and tannin? It's just the thing for heating the synapses. If you expect me to track down this chaos mage, I'm going to need a pick-me-up." He scrubbed his hair with both hands, blowing out an explosive breath. "I haven't regenerated, I'm sure of it. Yet here I am, brand new face, brand new everything and _where_…" He halted suddenly, looking puzzled. "…did I put the TARDIS?" He paused, scratching his chin. "I didn't double-park her in front of Downing Street again, did I?"

Willow wondered, as the Doctor rambled on, wandering over to check a tree, if this was what a psychotic break felt like. Hysteria kept bubbling up in her throat, wanting to spill out of her in either a scream or a laugh, she wasn't sure. She was… _dead_, her Xander-shaped friend was some kind of Doctor, or possibly an escapee from a mental ward somewhere, and Buffy…

Where was Buffy?

"What," the Doctor said, now crouching behind the tree, "do we have here?"

Against her better judgement, Willow drifted over to see what the Doctor was looking at. She rounded the tree and gasped. Buffy, with long, dark hair and a very authentic-looking medieval gown, lay prone behind the trunk. "Buffy!" She hurried to the Slayer's side, kneeling beside her. Instinct made her reach her hand out, but her fingers passed right through her friend's cheek. She pulled her hand back as if scalded. "Oh!"

The Doctor gave her a long, assessing look, but a smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. "Tell me, Ginger Ghost. Have you always been disembodied?"

**oOoOoOo**

Willow did not at all feel comfortable with leaving Cordelia in charge of Buffy. Even though Xander seemed to be on vacation, she would have preferred if he had stayed behind. He had, after all, managed to calm Buffy in the middle of her rant about being a proper lady by producing some sort of paper from his pocket that he claimed would explain everything.

Willow didn't see how a piece of paper the size of a credit card would explain _anything_, but Buffy had settled down in a chair, firmed her chin and nodded. So Willow wasn't going to poke too hard at it. Lady Buffy was a royal pain in the tail.

"You said chaos magic." She hadn't been intending to speak to the inhabitant of Xander's body, but she had never been all that comfy with awkward silences.

"Yes, I did, didn't I?" The Doctor shoved his hands in his pockets and looked thoughtful. "Ran into a bit of it back in the seventies. Several lifetimes ago for me, of course. Time's always been a bit wibbly-wobbly when it comes to me. Don't live it straight. Travel from here to there, hither to yon. Whatever strikes my fancy, really. Don't pay much attention to the bits in between. I'll see them sooner or later."  
Willow slowly shook her head. "I don't understand any of that."

"I'm a Time Lord. Long-lived, hard to kill. Normally, I have a big blue box somewhere, bigger on the inside than out. It travels in time. Well, anywhere in time and dimensions." He scratched his head. "Wish I knew where I left it. It would make the getting-around so much simpler."

Whookay. Time to steer the conversation back to saner waters. "What makes you think it's chaos magic?"

"Oh, I dunno. There's a taste it leaves in the air." His tongue curled out of his mouth again, and he made a face. "Oily. Like custard and fish fingers. Not at all something you want to willingly ingest, let me tell you."

"And you've… run into it before?"

The Doctor nodded. "Oh yes. London, early seventies. There was a group of teenagers running around, very sad sorts. Needed a few more hugs as children, the lot of them. Well, maybe a few _less_ hugs, in one case. And it's not exactly _magic_, per se. More of an extradimensional energy keyed to respond to certain words, items and phrases in order to alter the underlying principles of reality. It can do all sorts of things, including drawing the attention of every nasty pan-dimensional species in favor of destruction and subjugation. Which is what we seem to have going on here in good old Sunnydale, if my taste buds haven't failed me."

Willow knew she was only a novice at the whole magic gig, but that sure sounded like magic to her. "Alright," she said uncertainly. "What do you do about it?"

"Normally, if the 'magician'," and the Doctor included air quotes on that word, "is intelligent, he'll have an item that resonates with the frequencies he's attempting to control. It's absolute havoc on a human body to try and contain that sort of energy. You really don't want to see the results of _that_, let me tell you. It isn't pretty."

Oh, thank god. There was the school. Giles would know what to do. This was almost over. "So how do you stop the, er, frequencies?"

"Let me see…" He tilted his head back and stared at the sky. "Off the top of my head… broadcast an oscillating frequency to nullify the original vibrations caused by the key language, which would require knowledge of engineering and quantum physics this sad little wonderful planet hasn't yet accomplished… You could change the frequency being broadcast to slowly reverse itself over time which," he added, staring significantly at the monstrous kids running amok further down the street, "I personally wouldn't advise, given the immediacy of the situation. And you can break the focal point, which has immediate effects, but can cause some backlash, if you're not careful. Top of my head, tip of my noggin. Give me time, and I'll think of something else." He flashed that quick, easy grin. "Usually do."

She wasn't sure whether or not to be horrified, or reassured.

**oOoOoOo**

"Rupert Giles!"

Cards flew as Giles jumped, then he slowly turned around. It was Xander, in a rumpled blue pinstripe suit, his hair mussed and a wide, bright grin. "Rupert bloody Giles. Oh, it's been forever since I've seen you! Should have known you'd be eyes deep in all this chaos magic business. Don't suppose any of the old gang is still about? Sutcliff or Deirdre or that delightfully sociopathic Ethan Rayne chap?"

Giles' mouth opened and closed several times, and the blood drained from his face. "Good Lord," he whispered. "It can't be."

Xander strode forward and clapped him on the shoulder. "Oh, don't look so worried, mate. As I hear it, you've reformed. Straight and narrow, all on the up and up. Dipped your toe well into tweedy waters, so to speak."

He pulled his glasses from his face and began polishing them furiously with a handkerchief. "You're the Doctor?"

The boy in question rocked forward and back on his feet, smiling bemusedly. "That's what I told the pretty discorporate girl. I suppose it's possible I inhabit the body of some poor boy unlucky enough to live in Sunnydale on Halloween with chaos magic in the air. It's equally possible I've undergone a regeneration I can't remember. So tell me, Ripper. With all this chaos magic in the air, which do you think is more likely?"

Giles was saved from having to answer by nearly having a heart attack when Willow walked through the wall right in front of him, gave him a tired smile and said, "Hi."

**oOoOoOo**

The Doctor could feel the energy coursing through the back room of the costume shop, sticky-icky wibbly-wobbly reality-altering energy that did not taste like fish fingers and custard, but more of peanut butter and cod liver oil. He glanced at the man standing beside him, a far cry from the rebellious, troubled youth he had very briefly known decades ago. Well, not as much of a far cry as he normally was, not now. Not tonight. Not with Ethan Rayne in town, toying with forces he wasn't interested in understanding and reminding Giles of all the things he'd tried very hard to forget.

"You can't kill him," he said quietly, and Giles gave him a sharp look. "Oh, I know you want to, and I know you're planning to. But you know how it works, Rupert. There are changeable events and there are fixed points."

"Halloween is a fixed point." Another man would have been intimidated by the flat tone in Giles' voice, but the Doctor wasn't any other man. He wasn't even technically a man.

"Noooo," the Doctor said slowly. "But you are. Or, rather, you will be. And if you kill him, Rupert, that will change a great many things that need to remain the same because it will change a great many things about _you_ that need to remain the same. So you can't kill him." A quick grin, ever present. "You can, however, hurt him just a little bit."

The answering grin on Giles' face was quick, vicious and gave the Doctor a shivery sort of feeling that had absolutely nothing to do with all the timey-wimey stuff he could feel floating around the room.  
It was only after Giles disappeared into the back room that the Doctor remembered he hadn't told Giles how to end the spell. Well, no matter. Giles would figure it out.

A few minutes after the thudding and the groaning, there was a heavy, reverberating crash from inside, and the Doctor felt a feeling not unlike the onset of regeneration come over him. It was the end. But the moment had been prepared for.

The cramps hit him first, as they always did. His insides were rearranging themselves, as they had to. The ginger ghost had been right after all, this wasn't his body. Not his original, not any of his incarnations' forms. This body belonged to a sixteen-year-old boy living on the Hellmouth in a very important location filled with very important people. The Doctor wasn't at all sure what would happen to him, but he knew that this was not a fixed point. Events were in flux here, and whatever would happen would change the course of history. Whether or not it was a major change or a minor one remained to be seen. He bent double, cradling his midsection and breathing through his nose. Bracing himself for what was going to come.

This was going to hurt.

It did. A lot.

**oOoOoOo**

Xander straightened up, mind swimming with the brief but violent agony that ripped through him. "That was weird," he groaned. It didn't even come close to describing the sensation of sharing a body with a nine-hundred-year-old Time Lord's consciousness. It didn't come close to describing the vortexes of golden light wrapped around everything, with having seen the fall of Pompeii with his own two eyes, with the memory of the Daleks and the Cybermen and the Slitheen and everything else.

It came nowhere _near_ describing the sensation of two hearts still pounding away in his chest, the taste of peanut butter and cod liver on the air, the traces of gold he could sense in the corner of his eye. The sonic screwdriver weighing down his inner pocket, the psychic paper pressed against his leg in his pocket. The memory of constructing and reconstructing the TARDIS until she was almost a brand new blue box several times over.

It came nowhere remotely near being able to describe any of that.

But "that was weird" was all he had.


	3. Nov 1, 1997: Very Early Morning

Nov 1, 1997: Very Early Morning

**Genre**: Dramady, YAHF.  
**Word Count**: ~2000  
**Warnings**: Familiarity with Tenth Doctor, and through to "Halloween", Season 2 of Buffy. Timelines: Hm. Certainly not up to Bad Wolf Bay, but definitely as far as "The Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit" two-parter (2x9 and 2x10 respectively).  
**Disclaimer**: I do not own Scooby, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who, or David Tennant, though I'd very much like to own David Tennant. I am not profiting financially from this bit of silliness.  
**Author's Note**: Thank you to everyone who's reviewed. I will be getting to individual reviews as time permits. Cross my hearts.

_Sunnydale, California  
November 1, 1997  
The Harris Household_

Xander lay on his back with his arms crossed under his head, staring at the ceiling. He should be freaking out, he knew. He should be having the freak out to end all freak outs, but that sounded exhausting and after Ethan's spell ended, he just didn't have the energy to put into a proper freaking.

Besides, this was far from the weirdest thing to ever happen to the Doctor. Or, for that matter, plain old Xander. There were just as many Incan mummy girls, mantis ladies and possessed ventriloquist dolls swimming around in his head as there were pilot fish, Daleks and Sycorax.

And if that wasn't the saddest fact about his life, he couldn't think of another one.

He wondered if Buffy recalled anything about her blast to the past from the previous night. Somehow, he didn't think she did. The noblewoman possessing her had seemed less of an actual personality and more of a caricature. The Doctor had known noblewomen from 1775, after all. He wondered if the pseudo-person had any traits that had left themselves imprinted on the Slayer, or if everything had faded with the spell.

Xander rolled off the bed and walked to the mirror, leaning against the bureau and staring at his reflection. He was exactly the same as he had been not twenty-four hours ago. Slightly goofy, sixteen, dark-haired and dark-eyed. And yet, he was forever different.

On the one hand, it was the very first time he had looked in the mirror to see a stranger staring back at him. On the other hand, this was old hat, and he looked in the mirror often enough to be strangely comfortable with the idea that he had no notion of who the reflected man really was. He sighed and pushed away from the dresser, shoving both hands in his hair. And to top it all off, he still wasn't ginger. Red-haired! Not ginger, red-haired.

Sweet Rassillon, was he going to end up talking like Giles now?

Maybe a change of clothes would help. Xander, the Xander he had been – was it only yesterday? – scoffed at the idea that simply changing his clothes would help anything. But the Doctor understood that clothes made the man. He always had an easier time assimilating new bodies when he found them their own particular style.

He threw open the closet door and, even though he knew what to expect, nearly threw his arm over his eyes to protect his sight from the garish colors. Row upon row of Hawaiian shirts hung there, quietly menacing the vision of everyone who looked upon them.

On one hand, Xander loved them. On the other hand, good lord. Was there anything that wasn't Hawaiian or flannel in here?

Xander remembered the Doctor's ninth incarnation being very comfortable in jeans and a leather jacket. His ninth incarnation hadn't lasted very long, but he could hardly blame the clothing for that. He rummaged through his closet, discarding plaid and color left and right, until there was a messy pile of shirts on either side of the doors. There wasn't much left, once he'd taken those styles out of the picture. He had a couple of dark shirts, blue jeans, and one blue suit jacket whose pants were more than a little moth-eaten.

He pulled a black shirt, the suit jacket and a pair of jeans out, making a face as he did so. Times like this, he really missed the TARDIS and that gigantic closet.

**oOoOoOo**

Now more suitably dressed, Xander wandered out his front door and into the Sunnydale night. Normally, he would load himself down with crosses, holy water and garlic before venturing anywhere near the post-sunset streets, but all he had tonight was his sonic screwdriver sitting comfortably in the inner pocket of his sports jacket. He sincerely hoped he wouldn't run into Buffy; the last thing he wanted tonight was a lecture from the town's resident Slayer.

She would have a point, though. Even before she had come to Sunnydale, before he knew the details of what exactly bumped in the night, Xander knew not to screw around with curfew. When the sun went down, he was in a well-lit area, or inside. End of story. There was still a part of him that was quivering in fear at the idea of being outside without Buffy or Willow or Giles or even Cordelia. If nothing else, Cordy would make an excellent distraction. He could push her at the vampires and then rabbit the other way while she was verbally eviscerating their fashion sense.

But the newest part of him, the memories of the Doctor, dulled the edge of that fear. He remembered an all-out war with vampires. He remembered staking the King of Vampires himself. Sunnydale wannabes paled in comparison to those horrors.

He sighed, shoving his hands in his pockets and hunching his shoulders as he walked. If it was just the memories, he could deal. He could be the king of dealing. Between his crappy parents and crappy teachers and Synder the troll and his extracurricular slayage activities, he knew how to cope with the weird stuff. But it wasn't just the memories of a nine-hundred-odd year old Time Lord. It was the body of a Time Lord too.

"Well, well. What do we have here, boys?"

"I'd say it looks like a midnight snack, Jerry."

"Heh, yeah. I'm hungry too."

He looked up and cursed his inattention. Three vampires, game faces on, had come from a darker side street to block his way. He sighed again. "You really don't want to do this," he said, hand reaching into his pocket for the sonic screwdriver. If he could find the right setting, he could drive them off before they could attack.

Jerry stalked forward, flanked by the other two. None of them seemed the least bit shaken by his somewhat lackluster warning. "Oh, I think we do."

His fingers just closed on the smooth shaft of the sonic when they made their first move. Jerry surged forward, his arm swinging in a clumsy but brutal right hook. Xander barely dodged it, pulling the sonic free. The flip-wallet containing the psychic paper came with it, and fell flat on the pavement. "Seriously?" he said, dodging another punch. "You really want to tangle with me? Do you even know who I am?"

"Don't know, don't care." Jerry swung again and this time connected. Xander staggered back, nearly losing his grip on the sonic, eyes crossing. Ow, that hurt. He cleared his vision in time to dive to the side, avoiding the brunt of Jerry's follow-up spin-kick. But he took enough of it to send him reeling again.

Desperately tapping the settings on the sonic, he scanned for the other two vampires. One was circling around, and the other was bent over to pick up his flip wallet, grinning with his tongue between his teeth. The idiot probably thought it was loaded with cash. "The frequency of ultraviolet light is normally between…10 and 400 nanometers. So that's setting… Ah _ha_! Setting 5428.21!" He swung the sonic around, leveled at the unnamed vampire circling behind him, and thumbed the activation.

The sonic lit up with its typical whirring pulse and the vampire's left arm suddenly caught on fire. Xander rolled his wrist, flicking the sonic left and right, and more of the vampire caught fire. The creature let out a single, terrified scream and took off running. Flames billowed into the sky as the rest of the vampire went up. By twenty feet, dust floated on the wind.

Xander whirled on Jerry, sonic screwdriver extended aggressively. Jerry's hands went up and he took a step back. "Whoa, man. Hey. Can't you take a joke?"

The other vampire, who had picked up the fallen wallet, had gone pale. Well, paler. "Jerry?" There was a quaver in his voice. "Jerry, he's an associate at Wolfram and Hart. Ad…Advisor to the Senior Partners."

Xander had no idea what Wolfram and Hart was, but what the hell, he'd play along. "I asked you if you knew who I was," he said mildly, but didn't lower the sonic screwdriver.

Jerry backed off rapidly, nearly falling over himself to put distance between himself and Xander. "So sorry, sir," he stammered. "We didn't know. It won't happen again."

"Right. See that it doesn't." Xander tucked the screwdriver back in his pocket and held out his hand. He'd never seen a meek vampire before – Deadboy didn't count, he was barely a vampire as it was – but the unnamed vampire who crept forward to place the wallet back in his hand was meek as a kitten. "Now go on, get out of here."

"Yes sir," the unnamed said, backed away, and then the two remaining of the trio turned tail and ran like hellhounds were nipping at their heels.

Xander watched them go, bemused and confused. He put the wallet away, wondering exactly what the hell had just happened. Well, not the vampire _flambé_; he was fairly sure he knew exactly what that was. He'd done it, after all.

But the Senior Partners? Who in the name of the Exotar Alignment were they? And why would they terrify vampires?

He had come out without destination, but he had one now. He turned on his heel and started walking. He really needed to speak to someone –_a companion_, the voice in the back of his head whispered – and he didn't think either Buffy or Willow needed all this dropped on them at the moment. He was still as revulsed as ever to think of having a conversation with Deadboy, and he'd rather gouge out his own eyes than listen to Cordelia rant on and on.

That left Giles.

Giles was perfect, when he thought about it a little more. He was British, which the Doctor part of Xander always felt more comfortable around, he already knew about the Doctor, thus saving any messy, drawn-out long explanations, and he was the one person Xander knew in town guaranteed to have a decent tea pot. Even in the unlikely event Giles couldn't help him, he could still get a good cuppa before he went home.


	4. Nov 1, 97: Conversations with Manic Peop

Nov 1, 97: Conversations with Manic People

**Genre**: Dramady, YAHF.  
**Word Count**: ~2800  
**Warnings**: Familiarity with Tenth Doctor, and through to "Halloween", Season 2 of Buffy. Timelines: Hm. Certainly not up to Bad Wolf Bay, but definitely as far as "The Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit" two-parter (2x9 and 2x10 respectively).  
**Disclaimer**: I do not own Scooby, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who, or David Tennant, though I'd very much like to own David Tennant. I am not profiting financially from this bit of silliness. Borrowed lines of dialogue from Ten and Five and Nine, in respective order.

**-**

Giles studied his brandy, as if that would give him any answers. He sat by the fire in his study, swirling the amber liquid around and around in his glass. He was still trying to process everything that had happened; including the appearance of a man he thought was long, long gone.

He remembered the first time he met the Doctor. He had been twenty, still trying to convince girls he was a founding member of Pink Floyd, and delving more and more heavily into black magic. To this day, he still cringed to think of what a dangerous little wanker he had been in his early 20s. So repulsed by his quote-unquote 'destiny', the notion of becoming a Watcher completely abhorrent to him, he would rather become the problem than be a part of the solution.

It had come close, so extraordinarily close, to a full-out addiction. Days and nights of rituals designed to do nothing more than serve as pleasure. Mind-affecting spells to influence women and men into doing what they wanted. Cantrips tantamount to date rape. Summoning demons so dangerous they would have been slain on principle if anyone had ever caught them.

No, he thought as he sipped his brandy. That wasn't exactly true. Someone _had_ caught them. But he'd been far more forgiving of them than the Watcher's Council or, god forbid, the Slayer, would have been. A madman in a ridiculously impractical scarf, with a big blue box, pulling them back from the brink of pure evil. Even with his help, Randall had still died, but reality-altering demons hadn't been allowed a permanent foothold into this world, so Giles had to still chalk that one in the "win" column.

Sometime soon after that, Giles had reformed from dark magic, let his magical talent wither and become a Watcher. He hadn't even kept in touch with the others, not really. A card at Christmas with Deirdre and Phillip, the odd phone call with Thomas to discuss various aspects of his work, and Ethan…

Good lord, Ethan. Where to begin?

Ethan had been his best mate. His brother in all but blood. There was no act of rebellion and anarchy they hadn't engaged in together. The others had been middling spellcasters at best; it was Ethan and Giles that had the power, the drive, the intelligence and the motivation to lead their little coven of warlocks and sorcerers.

Ethan, the mate he had tried very, very hard to forget in the ensuing decades. Ethan, who had gone deeper into darkness than sanity would allow. Who would no doubt welcome Giles back with open arms if he ever slipped off the high road, but would make his life as miserable and chaotic as possible until he did.

Ethan bloody buggering Rayne. Of course he'd come to the Hellmouth for Halloween. With the Slayer active, the Hellmouth waking up for the first time in centuries and, best of all, his old mate Ripper present, where else would he go?

Giles should have seen it coming. Logically, he knew he couldn't blame himself for the whole debacle, but he also knew he held some responsibility for it. He'd been complacent. If it hadn't been Ethan, it would have been something else. Just because Halloween was traditionally a night off for all the ghosties and ghouls didn't mean that tradition would be followed.

He should have been more prepared.

His Slayer had almost died, stripped of her memories and power. Willow _had_ died, and it was just incredibly lucky the condition was temporary. Children had been turned into monsters, innocent people had been killed by their neighbours and friends, and Xander…

Xander had become the Doctor. The one person Giles both respected deeply at the same time he wished to never lay eyes on again.

He'd spoken to Buffy and Willow briefly. Buffy had shaken off the experience like it was nothing. Maybe to the Slayer it was. He still didn't fully understand the Slayer essence, how it protected and empowered Buffy. Perhaps the abilities of the Slayer offered some compensation for shaking off trauma and shock. It certainly seemed to, now that he thought about all the horrors Buffy had faced in her small handful of years as the active Slayer. And Willow… Giles could comfortably say he knew her as well as he knew his Slayer. When he asked her how she was doing, she had responded brightly, but there was a brittle quality to her words that made Giles think she would be having some nightmares about suffocation and death in the near future. She would no doubt bounce back from it, but it would take some time.

He hadn't been able to reach Xander, however, and that concerned him. Buffy remembered some things from her possession and Willow expressed her expectation that parts of her body would continue to pass through solid objects. So there'd obviously been some lasting effects.

What sorts of lasting effects would Xander have?

Giles glanced at the phone, then at the clock beside it. It was very late, or early, but he debated the merit of trying to contact the boy in question again. His one meeting with the actual Doctor had unsettled him to the point where he'd completely turned his life around; his meeting with the pseudo-Doctor had left him just as uneasy.

No, he decided. It was too late. The last thing he wanted to do was wake the boy's parents. He'd leave it until the next day at school.

He finished his brandy, and set the glass on the table next to the snifter. He really should bring it into the kitchen, but nights like this made him feel every single one of his years. Besides, he didn't have a roommate to worry about. Even Jenny wasn't here to gently nag about his lack of housekeeping. He was just going to go to bed, and he'd clean up after himself in the morning.

He had just gotten out of his chair when a knock at the door caught his attention. Reflexively, he glanced at the clock. It was well into the wee hours, far too late for any trick-or-treaters. He picked up the candy bucket anyway, just in case.

He opened the door with the bowl of candy cradled in his arm, and blinked in surprise to see Xander standing on the porch, wearing jeans and a sports jacket, hands half in his pockets. "Xander?"

"Hello, Ripper," Xander said with a wide grin, with an echo of Estuary English in his voice. "Trick or treat."

**oOoOoOo**

Giles waited for the kettle to boil, polishing his glasses on the dishrag. He glanced over his shoulder at the dark-haired boy seated on the couch in the living room and fought the urge to rub his temples. Part of him wished the kettle would just not reach boiling, because then he could just stay in the kitchen and not deal with what was no doubt a fairly large problem waiting patiently for his tea tray.

To distract himself from thinking too hard about Xander, if only for a few moments, he fished the canister of tea leaves out of his cabinet and began spooning them into the pewter tea pot on the warming tray. When the electric kettle clicked off, he poured the water into the pot, arranged the milk and sugar, and then looked for any other excuse to put off going into the living room.

He had none so, with a sigh, he picked up the tray and joined Xander in the living room.

Xander looked up as he entered, and a smile split his face. "I never thought I'd be so happy to see a British man with a tea tray." He made room on the coffee table by moving several tomes and magazines to the side and Giles set the tray down. Xander poured himself up a cup, mixed in sugar, and inhaled deeply over the steaming mug before taking a sip. "Ahh," he said with no small amount of satisfaction. "That's fantastic."

That hint of accent again. Giles poured his own cup and debated splashing a large dollop of something little harder than tea into the cup. But he was already one past his own brandy limit, and he had the feeling this conversation would require a large part of his attention. So as tempting as getting pissed was, it was probably better that he didn't.

"Do you know," Xander said, bright smile still in place, "that I hate tea? Really, I do. The smell, the taste, the very look of it. I'm American. I drink coffee and soda and overly sugary beverages of questionable colors. I'm a Sunny D man. A Tang man. A Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts man." He stared into the dark liquid, then picked it up and sipped again. "But it makes me feel better. Clears the ol' noggin. Shakes out the cobwebs, so to speak."

Giles refrained from comment, simply drank his own tea slowly and watched the boy. Despite his improved dress sense and sudden desire for tea, he seemed relatively unchanged. But there'd been that disturbing "Hello, Ripper," when he'd opened the door, and the accent that Xander slid in and out of.

"How much do you remember, Xander?" he asked.

Xander glanced up and smiled tiredly. "I don't think there's a word that can properly quantify just how much I remember," he said. "I've got ten men in my head, all _way_ smarter than me, and none of them can think of a word either."

Giles blinked and set the cup down, suddenly concerned. "My word, Xander… Are they disparate entities in your head?"

Xander gave Giles a look that clearly said he thought he was crazy. "What? No. Well." He looked thoughtful for a moment, then shook his head. "No. Not really. It's… hard to describe."

Giles nodded, even though he really didn't understand. Then again, he didn't have ten men in _his_ head, so how could he rightly understand? There were so many questions he wanted answers to, including _do you know about Eyghon?_ and _can you still see the time stream?_ "How did you end up being possessed by the Doctor?" he asked instead.

"I had a limited budget for Halloween. King of the two-dollar costume." There was a hint of bitterness in Xander's tone. He sat back and pushed his hands into his hair. "I actually went to Ethan's to buy a toy gun. I had army fatigues at home, so I figured I could go as a soldier. Man, that would have been a better choice." He gulped more tea. "I had ten bucks in my pocket, not nearly enough for a full costume. But the last toy gun went to a kid, so I had to find something else. There was this suit…" He trailed off, and Giles nodded from there.

"Buffy mentioned Ethan offered a deal she couldn't refuse. I assume much the same thing was offered to you?"

Xander blew out a breath. "Yes. The pinstripe suit, for whatever I had in my wallet."

Giles growled, wishing he could hop back in time to a few hours ago and kick Ethan a few more times for good measure. The blighter had known what he was doing, damn him. Though, Giles considered a second later, had he known his spell would bring the Doctor, he doubted the pinstripe suit would have been on display. The Doctor had disturbed Ethan just as much, if not more, than Giles.

"And then you were possessed by the Doctor."

"And then I was possessed by the Doctor." A brief moment of hesitation, an uncertain look in Xander's eyes. "But there's more."

Giles sighed. "There usually is," he murmured into the rim of his teacup.

"I'm… different, now."

"How do you mean, different?"

"The end of the spell, it… I've thought about it, and thought about it, and the best explanation I've come up with is that the spell essentially killed the Doctor, ripping him back out of my head. It… triggered his regeneration cycle, and it … changed me. I can feel the Earth spinning through space. I know history, all of it. Even the history that hasn't happened yet. If I think hard enough about it, I can remember being there. And there's this." Xander reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin metal device. Giles recognized it, and wished he didn't. "I'm not…" Xander swallowed, looking sick. "I'm not human anymore. I'm a Time Lord."

Giles decided to break the brandy back out again after all.

**oOoOoOo**

"You're taking this rather well," Xander said.

Giles set a glass of amber liquid in front of him and snorted. "I fail to see the benefit in running around in panic, as tempting as the thought is."

"Fair enough." He eyed the glass. "Giving me brandy? You know I'm underage, right?"

Giles swirled his glass, speculatively. "Are you?"

Xander opened his mouth to answer, then snapped it shut. It was a fair question. Was he still underage? He had the memories of almost a thousand years of experience in his head, but he distinctly remembered only sixteen years of life. "Never mind," he said, somewhat sullenly. The first experimental sip didn't burn his mouth as he expected it would, but he didn't follow that sip with another. Too many alcoholics in his family to want to indulge himself. That didn't mean he didn't appreciate the gesture. Giles was the first one to ever treat him like an adult, and this was just one more example of that.

"Why come to me, Xander?" Giles asked. "Why not speak with Buffy or, or Willow?"

Xander arched an eyebrow. Another fair question. "Because the explanations would be messy, long-winded and exhausting. You already know about the Doctor and, well… I'd rather not test how far my new body registers on Buffy's demon senses without preparation."

"I hardly think you have to worry about registering as a demon, Xander. From what I understand, which is admittedly somewhat limited, you appear human."

"Two hearts, Giles. You really think Buffy won't eventually hear the extra one?"

"Well, no. I see your point."

"And beyond that…" Xander fiddled with the sonic screwdriver, avoiding Giles' eyes. How could he explain the sudden desire to speak with companions? The Doctor, many times over, had grown lonely and bored. Plucking ordinary folk out of their lives to hare across the universe on temporal adventures was one of the perks. Even poor old Nine, melancholy and haunted, had eventually settled on Rose Tyler to keep him sane.

Rose. Oh Lord. There was a kettle of fish. Was she still traveling with him? (The other him? He really needed to pick a pronoun.) He hoped so. Rose was always good for a laugh.

Xander decided not to try and explain himself to Giles. He didn't even have a TARDIS, even if he had some vague notions as to how to go about obtaining one. That wasn't his first priority, though. His first priority was to somehow get in touch with his other self, have some tea, and have a chat.

"Thanks for the tea, Ripper," he said, standing up and leaving the nigh-untouched glass of brandy on the table. "And for the chinwag. I feel much better now. But things to do. Busy, busy, busy. Like a bee. Bee-like."

It was Giles' turn to arch his eyebrow. "Glad to be of service," he said. "Where are you going?"

"It's come to mind that I should really sit down and have a chat with Other Me. If nothing else, he should at least know he's not the last Time Lord anymore. Or, maybe he is. Maybe I don't get regeneration. Maybe this is all there is. I really don't know. I'm not even a hundred percent sure I can even get his attention – the Hellmouth tends to block temporal transmissions, though I've got a ton of ideas about how to get around that. Still, I should try. I owe the old bloke that much. So I'm off to build a Time Lord distress beacon."

"Good Lord." Giles blinked rapidly, then downed the rest of his brandy in one swift swallow. "Is that even possible?"

Xander grinned the wide, bright grin that held a slight note of mania in it. "Everything's possible when you've got a sonic screwdriver, an old AM/FM radio and copious amounts of free time, Ripper old boy. Plus," he said with a twinkle in his eye, "I got a first in jiggery pokery."

**oOoOoOo**


	5. Radio Shack Has Everything

**Chapter One: Radio Shack Has Everything**

_November 1, 1997  
Sunnydale, California  
8:57am_

It was slightly more complicated than an old AM/FM radio, in the end. Xander could gather together only a quarter of the parts necessary to broadcast a signal strong enough to pierce the shrouding effects of the Hellmouth as well as wide enough to span the timeline. He had cannibalized every part of junk electronics in the Harris household he could, and even with his spiffy new Time Lord brain, he was still dozens of parts short.

Still, he tried his best to put everything together without having to venture outside the house. His first problem had been to find a place to work uninterrupted. As solitary as the basement was, his parents still wandered down on occasion. He needed somewhere he could work uninterrupted.

It made sense to use the garage. Half the stuff he cannibalized was in there anyway, and once a few boxes were shifted around, he had plenty of space to work.

He worked through most of the night, too keyed up with his grand idea to really get any sleep. But by the time eight thirty rolled around, he knew he wouldn't get any farther in his work without more specific parts.

He tossed the welding mask aside and stretched, working out the kinks in his back that had come from being bent over a table soldering wires all night. The Gallifreyan musculature didn't render him immune from knots and strains, after all. He slid a hand through his hair, making a face at the dampness of his bangs. Or sweating like a pig, apparently.

He flicked through the sonic settings and ran a quick cleaning pulse over himself, feeling immensely better when it was done. At least his hair wasn't plastered to his forehead anymore.

He turned back to regard his creation, or what would be his creation with a few more additions. He scratched his head, considering. He could start raiding the working electronics in the house, but somehow he thought that his dad might notice, even in a drunken state, that the television was suddenly not working. Or picking up millions of channels. If he broke open the television, he wouldn't be able to resist tinkering about. He never could.

And there might be questions he really didn't want to answer if Mom suddenly got reception for _Coronation Nebula_.

Giles might enjoy it though.

Hm, there was an idea. Would the Watcher let him rip apart the telly if he promised, cross his hearts, that he could get dramatic soaps from across space and time?

He filed that idea away for later, under G for "Last Resort: Giles".

There was nothing for it. He was going to have to go shopping.

But how to pay for it? Xander had a few hundred dollars put away in a savings account for his post-high school wanderings. He was leery to dip into it – a lifetime of having next to no resources chafed fully at the idea of buying expensive things with it – but at the same time, willing to sacrifice it if it could help him get ahold of his … He really had to decide what to call him. Tenth? Other-Me?

Dad?

Xander shuddered. No. Definitely not.

He was gambling a lot, he knew . He was gambling that he could create a properly working beacon. He was gambling on it being able to broadcast over the shroud of the Hellmouth. He was gambling on it being able to reach far enough in space and time to be heard.

He was gambling on the Doctor being intrigued enough to answer the damn thing to begin with.

Then he was banking on the Doctor helping him acquire a TARDIS, though how Xander was going to go about that was currently beyond him. As far as he knew, he – Other Him – had the last working TARDIS in all of existence that wasn't Time Locked in a bubble of galactic war.

Xander didn't gamble, it often cost people their lives or souls. The Doctor didn't either, for much the same reason.

But it was worth a shake of the dice.

Well. If he was seeing this through, he'd better go all the way. Screw it. What good was money on a TARDIS anyway?

**oOoOoOo**

_Radio Electronics Emporium  
9:30am_

Jim hated the early shift, which is why his manager usually gave it to him. It was a relationship of mutual despite, but the difference in authority really tipped the scales in Pat's favor. Jim got all the scut shifts: early morning openings, Black Friday, Boxing Day, the week before E3. He hated it, but he wasn't all that qualified to do anything else but flip burgers, and he'd done the McJob thing in high school and would do anything short of murder to avoid going back.

Mondays were slow, so slow Corporate occasionally complained about the lack of profits stemming from opening so early in the beginning of the week. And, of course, the snark came back on him, since it was his shift. Why wasn't he promoting or upselling products? Why couldn't he manage to move items out the door? Why this, why that, why why why? Jim didn't bother telling him it was hard to upsell or promote or move when there were no customers to interact with, but he didn't bother explaining himself.

Pat knew, and Corporate would never understand.

He yawned as he climbed out of his truck, keys jingling in his hand. He was half an hour late, but the next employee wasn't due in until eleven, the laughable "lunch rush" hour, so who would tattle on him if he did some creative timekeeping? It wasn't like anyone was so desperate for ham radios and RAM sticks this early they'd be waiting for the doors to open.

Needless to say, he was somewhat surprised to see a dark-haired guy leaning against the side of the building.

His first thought was it was that creepy little Warren dude, looking for more wires and cables and doohickeys for whatever it was he did in his mom's basement, but a second glance put the lie to that assumption. Maybe the guy was just waiting for someone?

"Good morning," the guy said with a small wave. "Thought you guys opened at nine."

_Shit, a customer._ "Uh, yeah," he said, ducking his head to flip through the keyring until he found the key that opened the store front. "Sorry, dude. I'm running late this morning." Inwardly, he was cursing. There went his morning round of EverQuest. He couldn't get his MMO on if he had a customer wandering around the store. Hopefully, this guy was just here to buy a CD player or a part for a computer, he looked the nerdy computer type, and he'd leave Jim alone again. "If you give me five minutes, I'll have the store opened, and you can come on in."

"Fantastic," the guy said, and Jim did a double-take. He thought the only British guy was that Gillespy librarian guy at his little brother's school.

Jim flicked the lights on, swiped in (being careful to reset the clock for the proper time, he'd almost gotten caught last time he got creative with the computer system) and opened the register. It took less than five minutes, so he finished his coffee before he went back to the door and flipped the sign to "Open".

The dark-haired dude came in with a big smile and a small stack of papers in his hands. Jim got the sinking feeling that he wasn't going to get any EQ time anytime soon. "Excellent," he said, scanning shelves and floor displays. "Just what I was looking for." He consulted the list, then looked at Jim with a smile that was way too wide for this hour of a Monday morning. "Tell me, whereabouts are your toroidal frequency boosters?"

**oOoOoOo**

_Streets of Sunnydale  
11:36am_

When Xander still hadn't appeared by eleven, Willow was officially worried. He'd come into class late before – even being fray-adjacent took its toll on sleeping habits – but if he was going to oversleep, he usually managed to wake and get to class by ten. Eleven was unheard of, especially since he hadn't told Willow he was sick or injured or anything like that.

She scurried along the streets, clutching her books to her chest and generally feeling like a delinquent. Cordelia might mock her for being a nerd, but Willow never felt comfortable breaking school rules. Willow felt terrible for leaving school grounds before the day was over, and the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach kept her glancing over her shoulder for truancy officers coming to arrest her and throw her in detention. But Xander was missing and, after the previous night, she needed to see he was okay.

She made it to the top of his street unmolested by any officers of school law, and sighed in relief. She was almost to Xander's house. Once she was there, she would find him, no doubt sleeping off the weirdness that was Halloween, wake him, drag him back to school and pretend like she'd never had to slip off the campus in the first place.

She was somewhat surprised to see Xander coming from the other end of the street, arms filled with bags that had the red logo of the electronics shop on them. She gaped as he got closer; what the heck was he wearing? He actually looked… Willow blinked, considering. He actually looked pretty suave. The teeny tiny crush she'd been harboring on him for a while now suddenly roared to life.

Xander looked good.

Not that he hadn't looked good before! He was just… less hidey in the new clothes. The blue sports coat stretched across his shoulders far more tightly than the loose shirts ever had, and oh god, she remembered the last place he'd worn it, at Jesse's funeral and she remembered commenting on it because it hadn't been black but it had been all Xander had and he wished he could have afforded a nicer suit and…

"Hey Will," Xander said and Willow jumped just a little. When had he crept that close to her? "It's not even lunchtime yet. Why aren't you making with the schoolage?"

Willow firmed her shoulders. "Why aren't you, mister?"

Xander blinked, and Willow got the sudden feeling that he never even considered going to school today. "Oh, um… Yeah. I, ah…" He made a motion to scratch at the back of his head, and seemed somewhat startled when the rustling bags prevented him. Willow frowned; they looked like they were heavy. "I just needed a day off," he said. "You know. Hellmouthy weirdness last night, kinda rattled me. I'll be by later. Gotta make with the research and the donuts."

He smiled, but Willow wasn't so sure. He had Xander dodge-face, which only came out when someone asked him something he really didn't want to answer. She'd been on the receiving end of it a few times, enough to recognize it when it was given again.

Her gaze flicked down again, to the multitudinous shopping bags. "What's in the bags?" she asked.

"I'm just working on something," he said. "Shop class. You know, the only class I'm pulling a solid B in. It's just all stuff for my end of term project. You know how Mr. Arejo gets about end of term projects. All snarly and red-faced and stuff. I think we might want to look into him at some point. He might just be evil."

Having never taken shop class, no, Willow _didn't_ know how Mr. Arejo was. "Oh, okay. For a moment there, I was starting to wonder." She chewed on her lip, hugging her books tighter. "You're really okay?"

Xander's smile softened. "I'm really okay, Will," he said.

"And you'll come by the library after school?"

"Be there with bells on. Cross my hearts." He grinned and Willow couldn't help but feel muchly relieved by the fact that it was the usual Xander grin. She watched him head into the house, navigating awkwardly around the doorframe with his festoonment of bags, then turned to make her way back to the school. If she hurried, she could make it back before the lunch bell sounded.

She was halfway back when she suddenly stopped dead, a puzzled frown creasing her forehead. Wait, had he said _hearts_?

**oOoOoOo**

_Harris Household Garage  
3:24pm_

"Aaaaand… we're _done_! Ha! Take that, science!" Xander pulled the face mask off with a flourish and grinned down at the sleek, silver device quietly pulsing with blue and green lights. "Quantum mechanics said it couldn't be done," he told it, giving into the urge to do a little two-step around the table. "Yet here you are, you beautiful thing." He picked it up in both hands and planted an exuberant kiss on its surface. "Fantastic."

He took a deep breath and let it out, shaking his arms all the way down to his fingertips. "Okay, here we go." He bent over and, with great delicacy and being sure to doublecheck the setting on the sonic screwdriver, gave it a quick buzz. He jumped back, just in case it exploded, and held his breath.

The watermelon-sized orb lay silent for just a moment, long enough that Xander felt his hopes start to plummet. But then, the displays lit up, the LED lights started pulsing, and Xander felt the distress beacon begin its broadcast.

"Ha! Yes! It worked! Of course it worked. I'm a certifiable genius!" To celebrate, he danced a little more, but stopped when he caught sight of the clock. "Bugger! I'm also late. A genius and not on time, that's what I am."

He whirled back around, framing the distress beacon between his palms for a moment, then kissed it again. "You keep right on doing what you're doing, beauty," he told it. "I've got to get to the library before Willow gets any more suspicious."

**oOoOoOo**

_Stormcage Containment Facility  
5145_

The message was a simple one, broadcast throughout time and space. There were no words, no speech, no pattern discernible beyond _S.O.S_ in a very old dialect of Gallifreyan. The woman in Cell 8A, the most unrepentant murderer in the universe, received it on a handheld comm the guard passed her through the bars of her cell.

She took it to her bed and sat back down, pulling her foot back up on the spread. She thumbed the display as she painted her toenails, listening to the steady, rhythmic beeping play over and over again. She closed her eyes and tilted her head to the side, swaying as if listening to a symphony. And perhaps she was. Gallifrey had the most musical language, part sonata, part mathematical proof, and even an S.O.S sounded like an aria to her ears.

On the fifteenth iteration, her eyes snapped open and a smile curved her lips. She glanced down at the message pad and ran a finger over the edge of it. "Hello, darling," she murmured. "I've been wondering when you'd pop up."

**oOoOoOo**

Guard Bailey was due off shift at eleven, and when he didn't show up to clock out, Guard N'bara was sent to find him. N'bara was old hat at this, and he knew what he was going to find long before he found it. Sure enough, Bailey was slumped across the hall from Cell 8A, a dreamy smile on his face. The cell stood empty.

He checked on Bailey perfunctorily, thumbing back the man's eyelids to check his pupils. They were dilated, irises hazy and shining. All symptoms of the prisoner's hallucinogenic lipstick. He sighed and rose to his feet, strode to the phone alcove and picked up the receiver. There was no point to doing this anymore; the high muckety-mucks of Stormcage had long since given up on trying to keep the prisoner locked up. She came and went as she pleased, and N'bara got the idea she only came back because it amused her to plan her next escape.

But protocol was protocol.

He listened for a moment to the voice on the other end of the line. "Control, this is N'bara. Bailey's knocked loopy, but he's alright. Yes, sir. Doctor Song's escaped. Again."

**oOoOoOo**

_Somewhere  
Somewhen_

"Doctor, there's a beepy thingie."

The Doctor looked up from the wires he was soldering in the guts of the TARDIS console, squinting to make out the shape of the woman standing above him through the dark lenses of the goggles. "What sort of beepy thingie?" he asked suspiciously.

"I dunno. It's a beepy thingie."

He shoved his welding goggles to his forehead and swiped his hair back from his face. "Is it more of an oscillating _whoop whoop whoop_, or a staticky sort of _beeeeeep be-bebe-beep, be-bebe-beep_ sound?"

"The second one."

"Ah." The Doctor replaced his goggles and bent back to his blowtorch. "No matter then."

"It seems important."

"It's not. Or rather, it _is_. Just not for me." The Doctor stuck his tongue between his teeth and gave the uncooperative rod a good yank. He smiled with satisfaction when it clicked back into place and slid out from the wires.

Amy leaned over the guard rail, red hair swinging loose. "What is it then, this important-not-important beepy thingie you're not answering?"

"Time Lord distress beacon," he said, grunting as he hopped back up to the passenger platform.

Amy blinked. "What, like in the junkyard House bubble universe?"

"Not as such, no. Now!" The Doctor clapped his hands and rubbed them briskly. "Get out your sunscreen and floppy hats, Amy Pond. We're going to _Rio_!"

Amy Pond very much wanted to go to Rio, but she wanted to know about the beacon more. "Aren't you at all curious about the beepy thingie?"

The Doctor sighed. "You're not going to leave this alone, are you, Pond?"

Her eyebrow quirked, and a smug smile tugged at the corner of her lips. "Nope," she said, popping the P.

"Fine. Alright. Since you insist… _Yes_, it is a Time Lord beacon, a very crude one. It doesn't broadcast above the most basic frequencies and was cobbled together out of spare bits and geegaws purchased from the local electronics shop. _No_, it is not a trap like the one the junkyard entity set. And _no_, it doesn't interest me, because I've already seen the signal. I'm there already. Or, rather, the other me is. The last me. And he is much better equipped to deal with the source of the broadcast. I've no interest in do-overs, Pond, so I won't be answering this time. Do-overs are terribly boring. If that answers all your questions..?"

It didn't, not by a long shot. But Amy Pond had nowhere to be that the Doctor couldn't bring her in the nick of time, so she had days and weeks to winnow the rest of the story out of him. And winnow she would. If there was one thing she was good at, it was winnowing. "So. Rio?" she said.

The Doctor grinned. "Rio."

**oOoOoOo**

_Somewhere Else  
Some Other When_

"Doctor, there's a beeping thing, there on the screen."

The Doctor glanced up from the monitor he was current squinting at, pulled out his glasses and squinted at the monitor Rose pointed at. "Well, that's odd," he said, fiddling with a dial. "Give that knob a turn, Rose, second from the left, third from the top. See if we can't clear it up a smidge."

Rose ran her hand over the console, fingers resting lightly on a dial as she counted. "This one?" At the Doctor's affirmative, she gave it a twist and the signal on the screen grew clearer.

_beeeeeep be-bebe-beep, be-bebe-beep_

"What?"

Rose winced as the sound drilled into her ears and reverberated in her skull. She grimaced, pressing both hands to her ears. "What is it?" she asked loudly, turning to look at the Doctor for answers.

The Doctor had an expression on his face she'd never seen before: absolute gobsmacked shock. "What?"

Rose let go of her head with one hand and reached down to flick the dial back to its original setting. The beeping died down to a manageable buzz, and the pressure on Rose's ears eased up. But she had no mind for that. She whirled back to her travelling companion, worry creasing her forehead. "Doctor?"

"What?" he breathed, head tilted to the side, eyes distant.

"Doctor?"

It was shrill and it was nasally and Rose winced to hear that high a pitching coming from her throat, but it seemed to break the Doctor from whatever trance he'd been in. He blinked, shook his head, and turned to Rose with a look so serious it made her stomach shivery with fear. Then an exuberant grin split his face and his eyes lit up. "That, Rose Tyler," he said with deep delight, throwing out an arm to point at the screen, "is a Time Lord distress beacon." He leaped around the console, slapping at the controls. "A genuine, one-hundred-and-ten-percent authentic Time Lord distress beacon, broadcast in old Gallifreyan across all time and space. Do you know what this means?"

His excitement was catching; Rose felt herself smiling hesitantly. "We're going to find ourselves a Time Lord," she said.

The Doctor scooped up a spanner and hammered at the part of the column that always seemed to stick before rabbiting around to the other side to flick a series of toggles. He stilled for only a moment, long enough to say, "We're going to find ourselves a Time Lord."


	6. The Shapeshifting Demon

The Shapeshifting Demon

**Author's Note**: Alright, I've been asked some questions, and some things have been pointed out (nicely, mind). I'm going to address some of the more common things here instead of in the fiction, because that will add a whole lot of extraneous information that the characters don't need to know. But I have no problem answering them for you all.

1. **Regarding River Song**: She says "hello, darling" instead of "hello, sweetie" because, while Xander became a Time Lord by way of being possessed by Ten, he's _not_ her Doctor (Ten or Eleven). But this iteration of River _has_ met an older Xander, and knows a little about him. Enough for him to have his own pet name.

2. **Regarding the date**: It's been pointed out that November 1, 1997 was a Saturday, not a Monday as is in my fic. All I can say is, _oops_! Blame it on the timey-wimey stuff.

3. **Regarding Multi-crossover**: I'm planning on some. We'll see how far it goes.

4. **Regarding the Xanderbeacon**: Yes, technically speaking, more incarnations of the Doctor should have picked it up or answered it. HOWEVER, logically speaking, One through Seven would expect their superiors to answer it, Eight was a bit busy destroying the Daleks and creating the time lock, and Nine was short-lived and busy trying to get over his own personal horrors. Ten and Eleven would, therefore, be the only Doctors in positions to answer the beacon. And we established last chapter why Eleven wouldn't.

**oOoOoOo**  
_Sunnydale High School Library  
3:00pm_

Willow didn't like thinking bad thoughts about any of her friends, especially Xander. He'd been her friend, her only friend, her best friend, since kindergarten when a miniature Cordelia and her gaggle of airheads decided to make her life less fun. They had been the outcast kids together, banded against the evils of Cordy and the Cordettes. Jesse had come later – second grade, she thought – but right from the start, it had been her and Xander, against the rest of the world.

She knew Xander fairly well as a result. She knew his moods, his expressions, his behaviors. And right now, something was definitely wrong.

She only half-listened to Buffy raving about how thrilled she was to see Ford again, how she couldn't believe he was here in Sunnydale. She was trying to puzzle out exactly what was off with Xander. It wasn't the clothes, it wasn't the words or the tone or the way he held himself. It wasn't even the pile of shopping bags hanging from each wrist.

It was the hearts comment. Hearts. Plural.

After returning to the school, Willow had skipped lunch and her first class of the afternoon. She was worried enough that she had felt only a mild pang of unease at missing another class, one quickly shoved away and ignored. She spent two hours combing through _Demons, Demons, Demons_ and _Compendium of the Fallen Races_, looking for shapeshifting demons with multiple hearts. It was ridiculous. She just didn't know what else to do.

There were a surprising number of multi-hearted demons with illusory powers, psychic abilities, or shapeshifting. Since Willow didn't know what else to do, she was narrowing them down one by one. _D'mor'ak demon. Two hearts, on in its chest, the other in its… oh._ Willow's eyes widened at the fairly graphic sketch of the demon's physiology. With a slight flush, she flipped the page. Nope. Definitely not. _Barstromani demon? Oh. No lumpy back. Not Doppelxander._ Galifragos demon? Hm, there was a possibility. Looked human, two hearts, could change their face. Willow read a bit further and then shook her head. Oh. Only at death could they shapeshift to be reborn, with little control over their form. Not Xander then.

She flipped page after page, growing more and more frustrated as she eliminated the different species who qualified for her private theory. When she reached the end of the book with no solid lead, she slapped the book closed with a growl. Only then did she realize that Buffy had fallen silent and was staring at her curiously.

"Willow?" Buffy said. "Is everything alright?"

"I think Xander's been possessed, or-or replaced!" Willow shrank back in her chair, clapping her hands over her mouth. She hadn't wanted to say it, but it had just come out. She wished she could take it back, rewind time, but it was a little late for that.

Buffy narrowed her eyes. "What do you mean?"

Willow agonized for a moment, squeezing her eyes shut. What if it was Xander, and he was being possessed again, like with the hyena? What if he really had been replaced, as a way for the demonic population to get closer to the Slayer? What if… what if Halloween hadn't gone away? Willow dismissed that thought almost as soon as she had it. The spell had been broken, for everyone. Xander included.

Buffy was still waiting, tapping her fingernails on the table. Willow sighed. "Okay, don't freak out," she said. "It's probably nothing, but…"

**oOoOoOo**

Xander's first impression anything was wrong was the look on Willow's face when he entered the library. It took him a moment to notice, as he was still riding high on his success with the beacon. Willow's guilty face stopped him dead, and he got the nagging feeling that he was about to be conked on the head.

"Hi Will," he said carefully. The hair on the back of his neck rose. "Buffy's behind me with a lead pipe, isn't she?"

The frightened flick of her eyes to something over his shoulder confirmed it.

He turned around, tried for a casual smile and a wave. Buffy stood there, her head tilted to the side. He'd seen her do this before when she was concentrating really hard on hearing something. He wondered what she was listening for, then his eyes went wide. Oh crap!

Three had been a fighting man, and Ten certainly had his moments. But Xander had inherited his glass jaw.

Buffy's right hook took him out.

**oOoOoOo**

Buffy and Willow stood side by side at the book case, looking down at the unconscious Xander locked inside. Willow wringed her hands over and over again, fidgeting from foot to foot. She glanced between Buffy, standing with her arms crossed and a stubborn expression on her face, and whoever was pretending to be Xander, still looking exactly the same.

"Buffy," she said. "Maybe I'm wrong?"

Buffy shook her head, ponytail bouncing. "He has two hearts, Willow," she said. "I could hear them. Ba-da-da-boom. Really weird rhythm. It's like nothing I've ever heard before."

Whatever hopes Willow had that Xander was actually Xander shriveled and disappeared in the wake of Buffy's report. "Oh," she said, eyes downcast.

"Hey." Buffy put a hand on her shoulder. Willow glanced up. Buffy's eyes were rock-hard determination. "We'll get Xander back. Cross my heart."

Willow always felt better when Buffy promised things in that particular tone. Buffy had done the impossible more than once, fought things way stronger and beaten them easily. If she said she could get Xander back, she would. "So what now?" she asked, glancing back at the demon in her friend's body.

"Now?" Buffy blew out a breath that made her bangs float for a second. "Now, I have to go meet up with Ford before he gets all interested in why I spend so much time in the library, which was _so_ not me in Hemery. And _you_ go find Giles and see if he can get a handle on what we're dealing with." Buffy smiled to soften the blow. "I'm not knocking your research skills, Will, but Giles is kinda the go-to guy for all the weird and demony in town."

"Yeah, o-okay. I'll do that." Willow hesitated. "What are you going to tell Ford? A-about the Slaying and stuff. I mean, if he's an old friend, you'll want him on the team. Right?"

Buffy smiled as she shook her head. "I dunno yet," she admitted. "It's nice to see an old friend, but I don't know if he'll be able to handle it. I mean, Hemery was weird enough, with the gym-burning and all. Yeah, he was one of the only people to speak to me after everything went down, but I don't think he's ready to know about night-bumpy things. The farther he stays away from vampires and demons, the better off he'll be."

**oOoOoOo**

Xander came to in a sudden jolt. One minute, he was out cold, off in la-la land. The next minute, he was sitting up and rubbing his jaw. "Ow," he muttered, feeling along his jawline with tentative fingers. Nothing felt broken, but he was going to have one massive bruise before the day was out.

He paused. Or was he? He seemed to remember the Doctor getting bashed around quite a bit. Angry fists, stray pipes, misplaced light poles, that sort of thing. But he didn't recall any sort of injury that took him out for more than a few minutes. Whatever didn't kill a Time Lord seemed to heal very quickly. And whatever _did_ kill a Time Lord merely triggered a regeneration cycle.

Xander didn't know if he even got a regeneration cycle, so he wasn't eager to test that out.

Cautious of any other injuries he might have and not yet know about, he stood up. Fingers, toes, Adam's apple. Everything important seemed to be intact. "Still alive," he said to himself. "Chalk that up in the win column."

He glanced around, not even slightly surprised to find himself locked in the book cage of the library. What did surprise him was the fact that no one was guarding him or, for that matter, even in sight. On a hunch, he checked his pockets and found his sonic screwdriver right where he'd left it, along with three paper clips, a bit of string, and his flip wallet.

When he got out of here, and everything was explained, he was going to have a serious chat with Buffy about rifling through people's belongings before locking them up.

He debated the merits of breaking out now, but really, what else did he have to do? Right now, Buffy probably thought he was some sort of demon who'd eaten her friend and replaced him, and she'd want answers. If he broke out of the book cage, she'd only be more irritated and less likely to listen to him when she tracked him down. And he knew she _would_ track him down. It was hard to get away from people without a driver's license. Or a TARDIS.

Man, he really missed the TARDIS.

So, despite being very capable of releasing himself from captivity, Xander decided his best option was to just sit down and wait. Sooner or later, someone would come looking for answers. To pass the time, he ran a finger over the spines of the books on the shelf behind him, selected a weighty, meaty tome, and cracked it open.

**oOoOoOo**

Willow roamed the halls of the school, looking for Giles and avoiding teachers whose classes she'd skipped that day. She ducked into an empty classroom to hide from her French teacher, coming down the hall the opposite way. Thankfully, she was engrossed in her day planner, and didn't see Willow.

Willow rested her head against the wall and blew out a breath. She wasn't made for all this covert, clandestine stuff. She was no good at breaking rules and hiding from people and keeping secrets. No, wait. That wasn't true. She kept Buffy's secrets and she broke all sorts of rules to help Buffy out, and she was really good at hiding from vampires and other monsters, but… Teachers! She wasn't any good at hiding from teachers and breaking school rules. Only… Only she was pretty sure that a few of the teachers were evil, and she'd hidden from Giles in the stacks once or twice and he was like a teacher, and she was pretty sure that weapons were against school rules, as was using the school internet connection outside of class or study hall were all prohibited, and…

She needed to stop thinking that line of thought before she confused herself any further.

She peeked around the doorjamb to see if her teacher had disappeared. She had, and joy of joys, there was Giles! Sure, he was talking to Ms. Calendar and seemed animatedly involved in the conversation. Willow didn't like interrupting people in conversations, but Xander was important, wasn't he?

Squaring her shoulders, Willow pushed away from the wall and left the room, then hurried to catch up with them. "Giles!" she called.

The Watcher turned around, the amusement dissipating from his face. "Willow. What is it? What's wrong?"

She slowed to a stop. "Giles, it's Xander. He's in the library. You should come quickly."

"Good lord. I'll be right there." He turned back to Ms. Calendar and Willow couldn't see his face or hear what he said, but the computer teacher just nodded.

"I'll see you later, Rupert," she said.

**oOoOoOo**

Engrossed in his reading – my _my_, female Tessera demons were saucy wenches – Xander almost missed the swirl of gold spreading throughout the room. It tugged persistently at his senses though, until his head jerked up.

"What?" he said reflexively, then leaned forward to peer at the eddies and currents. He studied them for a long few moments, trying to puzzle out what was so important about _now_ that the time vortex leaked through.

It did that from time to time, he knew. It was part of how Time Lords could know the future, how they could tell fluid events from fixed points. He wasn't sure why; as studied as the vortex was, the surface of understanding had barely been scratched, even by the Time Lords before their unfortunate encounter with the Moment. But he was in a book cage and, as far as he knew, there wasn't even a Big Bad on the radar. How important could this honestly be?

Hazy images ghosted through the room, temporal wraiths that laid out the general shape of things to come. He saw a dead woman burn in the light of regeneration and, though he craned and squinted with great interest, he couldn't make out her face. He saw Angel with a devil's smile, and a portal to a very bad place opening unchallenged. He saw Willow and Giles and Ms. Calendar and Cordelia, and that orange-haired guitarist, only the guitarist was overlaid with fur and fangs and then, clear as day, he saw Buffy in a bomb shelter with betrayal bright in her eyes as she looked at a dark-haired guy he'd never seen before. Then the wraiths faded, leaving him with only the nagging feeling of needing to be somewhere, and a slight headache.

"Ow," he said, rubbing his temples. "Alright. I'm going. Sheesh."

He put the book back on the shelf, lining it up neatly with the others in the row, and moved to the cage door. A quick buzz of the sonic sprang the lock, and he was free.

**oOoOoOo**

Willow stared in shock at the empty book cage, took a couple of paces in and slowly spun in place. "I don't understand," she said. "It was right here!"

Giles rested a hand on the wire mesh. "What was here?"

"Xander! Or-or the thing pretending to be Xander! It escaped!"

Giles' eyebrow arched into his hairline. "There was a thing pretending to be Xander?"

Willow looked at him; there was something in his tone that made her want to shrink, like she'd just failed a test and had to face the teacher the next day. It all spilled out, the slightly-off behavior, the electronic equipment, the clothes, and the two hearts Buffy had heard. She finished up with, "We think Xander was replaced by a shapeshifter. We knocked him out and locked him up, then I came to find you."

Giles turned away, removing his glasses. This was not at all how Willow thought it would go. She thought Giles would be more concerned about Xander's welfare. She thought he'd tell her to break out the books, or check Xander's house, or ask where Buffy was.

"Giles?" she said hesitantly, and left the book cage. "Giles, what is it?"

The librarian's shoulders started to shake.

"Giles?"

Giles roared with laughter. "… A shapeshifting demon," he wheezed, tears streaming down his face. "And you… knocked him over the head and put him in the book cage…"

Willow didn't see what was so funny, but she was beginning to think she had missed something.

**oOoOoOo**

End Note: This chapter originally dealt with Ford, Eyghon and the meeting between the Doctor and Xander (and Rose and Buffy and everyone else), but it sort of got away from me, so I cut it in two. I will hopefully have the second half posted either later this evening or sometime tomorrow.


	7. The Eyghon Crisis: Part One

The Eyghon Crisis: Part One

**Genre**: Dramady, YAHF.  
**Word Count**: ~2750  
**Warnings**: None  
**Timelines**: Buffy Season 2, "Halloween." Doctor Who: Series 2x09/10 ("The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit"). Series 5 just after ep08/09 ("The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood"). Torchwood, general first season.  
**Disclaimer**: I do not own Scooby, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Torchwood, Doctor Who, or David Tennant, though I'd very much like to own David Tennant. I am not profiting financially from this bit of silliness.  
**Author's Note**: I don't know how happy I am with this, but I've held onto it long enough.

**The Eyghon Crisis: Part One**

_Somewhere_

The TARDIS shuddered and Rose held on for dear life. It wasn't as easy as she thought it would be, because despite the copious handholds available, she was trying to stay out of the Doctor's way. And the way he was jumping around, almost teleporting from one side of the TARDIS console to the other, he was impossible to predict.

"It's a bit… bumpy," she said.

"Can't be helped." The Doctor's tongue stuck between his teeth and his face was a mask of utter concentration. Rose had never seen him looking so intent, or intense. She felt a stir somewhere in the vicinity of her stomach, but that might have been the lurching TARDIS at work. "We're riding the intertemporal frequencies of the beacon. The signal is ridiculously weak. The splines mustn't be properly aligned. Or something's wrong with the flanging scransoms. And it looks like we're picking up some ancron interference across the spacio-spacial barrier."

Rose tried very hard to look like she was following what the Doctor was describing, but got tangled up somewhere around intertemporal frequencies. It felt like plane turbulence to her, but who was she to argue with a 945-year-old Time Lord?

The TARDIS hit a bad patch that nearly sent her flying across the room. The Doctor continued to babble about Time Rotors and gremlins in the gumworks, but Rose tuned him out, hugging the rail tightly with both arms and squeezing her eyes shut. She didn't want to open them again until the TARDIS landed safely, or it blew up.

Either way, the ride from hell would be over. There was being adventurous, there was being courageous, and then there was this.

_This_ was bloody ridiculous.

**oOoOoOo**

_Warehouse District  
6:20pm_

Xander followed the nagging tug in his head until he was outside a very stout-looking metal door, and then the sensation of being pulled along by his nose vanished. He stared at the door, scratching his head. Time was stagnant, fixed around the bunker. He examined the Gordian knot of time, lifting the sonic screwdriver to scan it more closely.

Time hummed a warning.

Xander blinked, but put up the sonic. "You have got to be kidding me. I can't even _examine_ you? Temperamental, touchy, prissy time knot." He squinted at it, just barely able to make out the floating digits of 6:27 inside the threads before time got huffy again and faded out of his sight. "Oh, come on!" he said. "That's the way you want to play it? _I_ am a Time Lord! Sort of! I have gazed into the Untempered Schism! Sort of! And you want to play this game with me? Do you know who I am? I'm the bloody Doctor! Well, okay, I'm not really the Doctor, I'm more of the…" His brain froze and his tongue tripped up as he realized he didn't actually have a title. He would have to remedy that in due course.

For right now, he had to figure out why this one particular moment was so important, because it really didn't seem to be.

"Well, never mind who I am," he muttered, sweeping the buzzing sonic screwdriver in the general vicinity of the fixed point. He still had a couple of minutes to go until whatever happened happened, so he would learn what he could. Moments like this, he bitterly missed the TARDIS with its on-board detection and analytical systems.

"Hello, darling."

Xander jumped a mile, yelping and bringing the sonic to bear on the figure that had crept up on him from behind. Though the woman didn't look threatening, Xander had lived on the Hellmouth as a normal sort of human long enough to know that appearances could be very deceiving.

The woman strode out of the shadows, and Xander got the niggling feeling he should know who she was. He frowned, but didn't lower the sonic. "Have we met?"

The woman beamed. "Just now for the very first time. But it won't be the last. Not by a long shot."

"You're from the future?"

Her smile widened, and she mimed turning a key over her lips. "Spoilers, darling. I'm only here to pass on a message."

Xander relaxed, but only marginally. That niggling feeling that told him to trust her wasn't solid enough for him to drop his guard too much. "What message?"

Her smile turned playful. "Ooh, so suspicious. You haven't changed much. Or, you won't change much, from your point of view." She stepped forward and Xander let her put her hands on his shoulders. Her expression softened, misted over, and she searched his face like she was seeing an old friend after a long absence. "My name is Doctor River Song, and I've come here to tell you that your journey is only beginning. You have a long, hard road ahead of you, and there will be times you doubt yourself, but in the end, it will be so worth it." She stepped back, and withdrew a small box from the pocket of her overcoat, studied for a minute, then held it out.

Xander cautiously took it from her, rolling it in his hand. It was plain, wooden and sealed with a clasp. He thumbed the hook experimentally, but it refused to budge. He arched an eyebrow, but Dr. Song just smiled.

"It's got a temporal seal," she said. "It will open when it needs to open."

"Okay," he said, shoving the box into his own pocket and finally lowering the sonic. If she was going to attack him, now would be the moment. His shoulders tensed but, when the moment passed without assault, he allowed himself to relax. "I don't usually take strange boxes from strange women who claim to know me, but I'll try anything once. Who gave you this message?"

Dr. Song shook her head. "I can't tell you too much without breaking a lot of those laws of time you and the Doctor hold so dear, darling. Suffice to say that she is known as the Gatekeeper, and you'll meet her sooner or later. She needs you to hold onto that box until it's time." She took a step back, watching him with a bemused, wistful smile. "Oh, I wish we had more time, darling. So much to catch up on. Unfortunately, I've got to go."

Xander heard a sound that made both his hearts skip a couple of beats.

The thrumming whoosh of the TARDIS manifesting in the present.

His head jerked back and he scanned around, but there was no familiar blue box in sight. He glanced to where Dr. Song had been standing, and was remarkably unsurprised to discover that she was gone.

He wished he wasn't used to people just vanishing like that, but sadly, he was.

"Track the stranger, TARDIS, TARDIS, track the stranger." Rassilon, this was a harder choice than it had to be. On the one hand, he knew this was an important moment, important enough that the vortex itself didn't want it messed with even if he, for the life of him, could not fathom _why_. On the other hand, TARDIS.

He waffled a moment longer, then checked his watch. Xander blinked. 6:29. The important, solid moment had come and gone. Had the woman, Doctor Song, been it? Or had he missed it entirely?

The TARDIS thrummed again, somewhere off in the distance, sounding closer to materialization. His questions would have to wait. "Alright, Other Me," he said, rubbing his hands together briskly and starting off in the direction of the sound. "Put the kettle on. It's time we had a chat."

**oOoOoOo**

_Sunnydale High School roof  
6:27pm_

The TARDIS set down with a jarring crash that would have sent Rose flying if she hadn't had such a death grip on the jump seat. The last few minutes of the journey had been full of turbulence that had made the previous bumpiness seem like a hay ride on an October afternoon.

The Doctor, seemingly unaffected, rap-a-tap-tapped a long string of commands into the TARDIS console, studying the readout. "Well, that's a piece of luck," he said, far too cheerfully for Rose's comfort. "We've landed on a rift of some sorts. It's a bit gunged up, the energy, but the old girl will sort all that out as she refuels." He patted the TARDIS fondly, then took off his glasses and put them into the inner breast pocket of his jacket. "Now," he said, shrugging into his overcoat. "There's a Time Lord about here somewhere, Rose Tyler. Which is absolutely impossible, but there you have it." He scratched his chin as he meandered to the exit. "Wonder who it is. Didn't recognize the signature, but that's not uncommon. Could be the Arbiter, he was always a bit of an odd duck. Liked to tinker about. The Oracle, maybe. Never heard one of her beacons before. She was odd, too. Liked to stare into the Schism for weeks on end. She went a bit cuckoo." The Doctor blinked. "Oh, the Cuckoo! Haven't seen him in ages. That wasn't his official title, of course, but it's what everyone called him."

Rose had tried desperately to pry her fingers from the metal rung of the TARDIS jump seat, but her body refused to believe the journey from hell was over and remained stubbornly clinging to safety. "You go ahead," she said, wincing as she finally managed to unclench her hands. They protested as circulation started up again, and she flexed them stiffly. "I'll just be a minute."

The Doctor drummed his fingers on the door. "Are you sure?"

Rose smiled, but knew it was a shaky one. She crunched her fingers again, but they were still stiff. "Yeah," she said. "I've got these pins and needles. Don't want to try and walk yet."

"I can wait," the Doctor said, but Rose knew he was just champing at the bit to get out there and find whoever had set off that beacon.

"No, you go," she said. "I'll just be a minute."

"If you're sure…"

"Go on!" She made a shooing motion, and immediately regretted it as the pins in her fingers and wrist flared. "Ten minutes. I'll find you. And if I can't, I've got my phone, yeah?" Not that she could fish it out of her jumper at the moment, but he didn't need to know that.

The Doctor flashed her one of those gorgeous grins and disappeared out the door with an excited, "Brilliant."

Rose breathed a sigh of relief as he left, then bonelessly collapsed back in the jump seat. She stared up at the TARDIS console while she waited for her blood to start circulating again. Was it just her imagination, or did the various lights and monitors look a bit weary?

Her ten minutes were just about up when the feeling finally returned to her fingers and her legs had stopped shaking. She leaned back in the jump seat for another moment, blowing out a breath that made her bangs dance briefly. Most of the time, she was perfectly happy to swan around the galaxy with the Doctor. More than perfectly happy. Delirious, even. But there were moments, brief and rare but there nonetheless, when she had to examine her own head and wonder exactly what the bloody hell she thought she was doing. This was one of those moments. And now that she'd had it, she could put off the next one for six months or so.

"Okay," she said, and forced herself to stand up. "Let's go see this rift then, shall we?"

**oOoOoOo**

_Moments Later_

She didn't know how she got into these sorts of situations. One moment, she was walking along the street, the next she was accosted by two blokes with facial deformities and intimidatingly large and pointy teeth. She ducked down an alley to escape them, but came up against a fence. She scanned frantically around for an exit, any exit, but there were none to be seen.

A hand came out of the darkness and seized her. "Run." She got a flash of black hair and dark eyes before she was jerked through a door into shadow and safety.

Rose shrieked and slapped at the hand, more out of reflex than anything else. "Ow! Hey! Why do I always get the slap-happy ones?" her accoster grumbled, and Rose was startled to hear a hint of Estuary English in his voice. There was a pause, and then he seized her by the shoulders. "Rose?"

She slapped at his hands again. Sure, the guy had just saved her life and all, but he was getting a bit too friendly for her tastes. She eyed him warily as the exuberant smile spread across his face and he fairly danced in place. Something to put her to mind of the Doctor, the manic smile, the spastic gleam in his eyes. She frowned in confusion. "I'm sorry, have we met?"

"Rose Tyler," he said with great relish, and grabbed her hand. "It's nice to meet you, Rose Tyler. Run for your life!"

Her mind went blank as shock washed through her. No. He hadn't regenerated. He couldn't have regenerated. Had he? "…Doctor?"

**oOoOoOo**

_Sunnydale High School_

His name was Xander, as it turned out, and he talked all the way back to the high school. Rose had heard some whopping stories in her travels with the Doctor. She'd even lived through a few of them. Xander's story was still hard to believe, but he knew so much, down to the mole on his – the other his – shoulder blade. He wasn't the Doctor, but he _had_ been the Doctor… It was absolutely insane. The possession she could believe, having been through it once or twice herself. (Twice, but it was both times Cassandra, that nasty trampoline-y bitch, so did it count as only once?) But magic spells? Pinstripe suits turning him into a Time Lord?

That stretched credulity just a tad.

Still, she had to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was far too crazy not to be true.

"He does love you, you know."

Abruptly jolted out of her thoughts, Rose, startled, glanced up at Xander. He was staring at her with inscrutable eyes, a thoughtful expression on his face. "Well, course he does. We're mates, ain't we?"

Xander smiled and looked away. "Yeah. Best mates. But it's more than that, Rose. You know it is."

Rose fiddled with the hem of her jacket. "It isn't that easy, Doctor." It slipped out before she was aware she said it, and she blinked. "There I go again, calling you the Doctor."

"It's easy to get confused. Tell you something, I'm a little confused too. See, on the one hand, I'm just this sixteen year old kid who got the bad end of a black magic spell and wound up with two hearts and a head full of weird memories. Wonderful, some of them. But not of the good, others. And on the other hand, I'm a nine-hundred-some-odd year old Time Lord who actually lived all those memories out." He paused a moment. "Nine kissed you."

Rose blinked again, this time more rapidly. "What? No, he didn't. I think I'd remember that."

Xander shrugged. "On Satellite 5, yes he did. You won't remember. You had just looked into the Time Vortex, so you weren't in your right mind."

"He _kissed_ me?"

"Oh yes. Right on the lips and everything. Don't worry. There wasn't any tongue."

Flustered, Rose wondered whether she should hit Xander or just crawl away and die under a rock. "He wouldn't have. He'd have told me."

Xander shrugged. "There wasn't time. He did it not because he had romantic feelings for you, but because he didn't want you to die. He really liked you, you know. And maybe, in those last few moments, he realized he _did_ have intentions towards you, because Nine became Ten. And Ten is somewhat tailor-made for you, Rose. You _have_ noticed that, haven't you?"

"But that can't be, can it?" Rose frowned. "The Doctor said he couldn't control it. That he never knew what kind of man he was right away."

"Rule one: The Doctor lies."

"He got skinny and sort of brown and cheerful, what, because I'd approve?"

"Basically." Xander blew out a breath. "He hasn't told you yet, has he? That he loves you?"

"Don't be daft. It's not like that."

Xander chuckled. "Oh, it's exactly like that," he said. "See, thing is, he's terrified."

"Of what?"

"Of you. Of Douglas Adams."

"What's Douglas Adams got to do with it?"

He grinned. "You know. Life. The universe. Everything."

Rose couldn't help but laugh just a little. "So the Doctor is scared of me? A shop girl from London. Little old me?"

"Yes, Rose Tyler. Little old you." He bumped her shoulder with his. "So you're going to have to make the first move, you know. You'll have to fight him tooth and nail to get what you want. But it'll be worth it, in the end. Because the Doctor is just as mad for you as you are for him."

Rose stared at Xander, so long and intensely he began to fidget. She really wanted it to be true, but there was the little voice inside that was trying to convince her Xander was just winding her up.

"Yes, really. Rose Tyler, put the both of you out of your mutual misery, and just _do_ something with him. He'll only do something incredibly stupid if you don't, like get you lost in a parallel world or do the noble, self-sacrificing thing and decide that you're better off without him. He's dumb like that, you know."

"But how… how do you know all this?"

In response, Xander just tapped his temple with a knowing smirk. "It helps when you've had a good look," he said.

The door behind them opened, and both turned to see who had come to the roof. The Doctor stepped out, regarding Xander suspiciously. "What's all this then?"

Rose clambered to her feet and went to the Doctor's side. "We were just talking."

The Doctor eyed Xander, who shrugged expansively. "Talking."

"Yeah, talking." Xander got to his feet a little less guiltily than Rose had, and dusted off the bottom of his coat. "It's what happens when you open your mouth and words come out. Another person hears them, opens _their_ mouth and words come out of there too."

Xander was nowhere feeling the casualness he infused into his words. "So," he said. "Guess we should talk."

The Doctor nodded slowly. "I suppose we should," he said, eyes unreadable.

Rose looked between the two Time Lords, the one who was born and the one who was made. Was it just her, or had the tension ratcheted up in the last few seconds. "I'm gonna…" She trailed off, gesturing with her thumb at the door. She disappeared through the door, leaving the Doctor and Xander up on the roof, staring at each other.

**oOoOoOo**

Endnote: Yes, I skipped Ford. Originally, that was the fixed point in time. I couldn't make it work the way it was in my head, though, so I introduced another element I hadn't planned on quite yet. Next chapter will have Willow, Buffy and Giles' conversation regarding Ford, what the Doctor was doing while Rose was being accosted by vampires, and the Eyghon incident. Also, the Untempered Schism. Tune in!


	8. The Eyghon Crisis: Part Two

The Eyghon Crisis, Part II

**Genre**: Dramady, YAHF.  
**Word Count**: ~2100  
**Warnings**: None  
**Timelines**: Buffy Season 2, "Halloween." Doctor Who: Series 2x09/10 ("The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit"). Series 5 just after ep08/09 ("The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood"). Torchwood, general first season.  
**Disclaimer**: I do not own Scooby, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Torchwood, Doctor Who, or David Tennant, though I'd very much like to own David Tennant. I am not profiting financially from this bit of silliness.  
**Author's Notes**: The conversation in the middle here just completely got away from me.

_Sunnydale High School Library_

"I thought you said Xander dressed as a doctor."

Buffy's confused, almost plaintive, tone made Giles want to dissolve into teary laughter again. The last day had not been good for his stomach muscles, which were cramping with all the laughing he'd been doing. No doubt poor Willow was traumatized, from the astonished looks she kept giving him.

He cleared his throat and polished his glasses, because if he didn't, he was going to burst into another bout of unmanly giggling. "Xander dressed as _the_ Doctor," he said, "which is a whole world of difference. The Doctor _is_ a doctor, but not every doctor is _the_Doctor."

The look on Buffy's face almost made him lose his composure again. He mastered his expression through supreme effort and calmly placed his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. "Honestly, Buffy, I can't simplify it any more than that."

Willow raised her hand, her forehead furrowed. "So he's still Xander?"

Finally, a question that wouldn't make him start laughing again. "In a manner of speaking," Giles said, and sat in the chair he normally occupied. "It's a little more complicated since Halloween."

"Well," Buffy said, leaning on her elbows. "Uncomplicate it for us. The more I know about it, the sooner I can fix it and get Xander back to his usual, goofy, properly numbered organed Xander self."

Giles paused. "It isn't ever going to be that simple, Buffy." Oh, how was he going to explain this to the girl who believed the word 'impossible' only meant it would take a little bit longer to accomplish? "The spell is a permanent one. Xander is not and probably will never be human again."

Buffy's expression settled into a mutinous, stubborn look, which had Giles reaching mentally for calming techniques. Should it really have surprised him that the Slayer, who by all accounts should already be dead, wouldn't accept an immutable fate for one of her friends? "Buffy…"

Buffy cut him off with a raised hand and a resolved shake of her head. "No, Giles. It's fixable. It has to be fixable." She turned to look at Willow. "Magic did this, right? So maybe magic can undo it. What do you think, Willow?"

Willow chewed on her lower lip uncertainly. "I-I dunno, Buffy. The spell Ethan cast Halloween night was pretty big. A-and I think Xander would want to have some input as well. I mean… what if he likes how he is now?"

"I can't believe what I'm hearing." Buffy's eyes were incredulous. "Something bad happened to Xander, something that hasn't gone away, and you're both waving your hands and saying tish-tosh."

Giles arched an eyebrow. "Tish tosh?"

"Or something equivalently British. The point is, this happened to Xander, and it's up to us to fix it. Xander started off human. I like him human. This…" She flicked her hand at the book in front of her, "Gilly Frigga—"

"Galifragos," Willow muttered.

"—demon can't be a good thing. As far as I'm concerned, this thing is a demon no different than a vampire. It turned him from a person into something that isn't a person, and we need to fix it."

Giles rolled his eyes skyward. "Very well, Buffy," he said, because the last few moments had proven to him it was utterly useless to keep arguing with the girl. "Where do you suggest we start?"

Buffy stared helplessly at the books. "I don't know," she said.

**oOoOoOo**

It was awfully silent on the roof after Rose disappeared. Xander knew the Doctor's expressions almost as well as his own, because he remembered them being his own. Though a casual observer might think the Doctor was lost in thought, Xander knew intimately it was his wary I'm-not-quite-sure-what-to-do-with-you face. He really couldn't blame the Doctor; if the roles were reversed, he had no doubt he'd look much the same.

"So you're me," he said finally.

Xander shrugged. "Yes. Well, no. Well, sort of. Let me explain-"

The Doctor waved him off. "I caught the gist of it from your little tete-a-tete with Rose. I heard what happened. There's a word for it."

"Magic?"

"Don't be daft. There's no such thing."

"Fine. Chaotic energy semi-intelligently shaped into altering the fabric of reality in such a way to be indistinguishable from magic to any underadvanced species. Is that better?"

The Doctor's lips quirked. "That's better. But you know the other word for it, the one I'm thinking."

"Metacrisis." Xander ran a hand through his hair, ruffling it idly. "I'm not. Would have burned up already if that were the case. Want to hear my theory?"

"I love a good theory."

"There's actually two."

"Ooh. Double the fun. What's the first?"

"The chaos energy, focused as it was through the procedures of Janus, acted as a temporary inverse Chameleon Arch. Instead of rewriting Gallifreyan to human, it rewrote human to Gallifreyan."

"Interesting. Yes, definitely interesting. What's the second?"

Xander grinned, unable to resist. "Magic."

"You're going to be trouble, I can see it now. But there's something I want to speak to you about before we get into the wherefores and the why nots."

"I'm all ears, good man."

"Yes, well… You've been going around claiming that you're the Doctor. Well, I won't have it. There's only one of me—"

"Two of you," Xander corrected.

"Oi! One of me!"

"Are we counting your previous regenerations? I seem to recall meeting yourself a time or two."

"There's only one Doctor, no matter how many regenerations he's gone through, and…" The Doctor blinked. "Hang on. You've got me talking in third person, is what you've done."

"Sorry."

"You don't look very apologetic."

"Don't I?"

"We're off topic."

"Yes, we are. Isn't it fun?"

"Oh, it is. But back to the Doctor business. It's my title, you can't have it. I don't object to you having your own, a proper Time Lord-y title. But you can't have mine."

Xander nodded, shoving his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels. "That seems fair. So what do you propose?"

The Doctor adopted the same stance. "First, you need a title. Then, you need a change of clothes." He cast a pitying glance over the simple outfit Xander had managed to cobble together out of his closet. Xander nodded. "And then, Rose willing, we'll jaunt off for a quick peek at the Untempered Schism."

Xander blinked. "What? No! I've already seen it."

"You haven't seen it with your eyes," the Doctor said.

"Weren't yours enough?"

"They were, for me. For you, you need to use your own."

Xander cursed under his breath. He'd been hoping to avoid gazing into the abyss of time. He should have known he wouldn't get away with it. "One thing at a time," he said. "The title. Do you have any suggestions?"

The Doctor's brow furrowed. "The Master's taken. He's a bit of a tosser anyway, so I wouldn't recommend that one."

"More reasons than one," Xander agreed. "There was a Master around here too, for a time."

"Oh? Nice bloke?"

"Vampire."

"Eurgh."

"I was thinking maybe the Warrior."

The Doctor's eyebrow went up. "Are you then?"

Xander made a face. "No, not really."

"There you go."

"So I should strike any combat-related titles?"

"Yes, I would suggest."

"The Traveler?"

"Too pedestrian."

"The Prodigal?"

"Too smarmy. The Chancellor? No, that one's taken."

"Do you really think he's going to pop out of the time lock and swing by to sue me for copyright infringement?"

"Touche. Still, no. The Visionary?"

"Also taken, and kind of a creepy individual. I wouldn't want to cross her, even if she is behind temporal locks at the present. The Demonologist?"

"Oh sure. Yes, you could be called that. Fancy being burned at the stake?"

"Earth doesn't do that anymore!"

"Nineteen hundred thirty two other places do, just off the top of my head."

"I just won't go to those places."

"Ever?"

"Point. Oh, here's a good one: the Collector!"

The Doctor shook his head, waving a hand in dismissal. "You should just call yourself the Crazy Old Cat Man and have done with it. Because that's how it starts."

Xander ran his hands through his hair and blew out a breath. "This is harder than it should be."

The Doctor smirked. "Scratch the Thinker, then."

"Oi!"

"Sorry. Nix the Philosopher, the War Chief and the President. They're taken. Also crazy."

"Well, yeah. Oh, what about animals?"

"Ooh! There's a thought. Not too popular with the Time Lords, animals. Never understood why, but I always assumed it's because no one wanted to get stuck being known as the Codfish."

Xander snickered. "Oh yes. Well, the only really neat animal is—"

"The Wolf."

"But it's taken. Yes?"

"Yes, I suspect it is."

"I could just stick with my own name. I may be a Time Lord—"

"Not yet."

"—but there's nothing to say I can't just use the name I was born with."

"Well, you could do that. Yeah, you could. Course you could. But why? Why would you want to gallivant throughout all space and time calling yourself Xander. What kind of a life is that?"

"Just what is the problem with it? I realize you're not at all fond of your name, and honestly, who would be? It's not like—"

"Hey! No! Don't say it! Don't you dare!"

"Oh, give over, will you? It's not the worst name in the world. It could be worse, you know. It could be Bob."

"There's nothing wrong with Bob."

"Or Dave."

"What's wrong with Dave?"

"It seems to attract creepy and/or barmy AIs. Do you really want a guy named Dave mucking about with a gorgeous girl like the TARDIS?"

The Doctor blinked, considering. "No, I suppose not. We're off-topic again, did you notice?"

"In fact, I did. And it's not because I'm trying to put off staring into the swirl of eternal chaos as long as I possibly can."

The Doctor stabbed a finger at him. "You've already got a title all picked out."

Xander winced. "Am I that transparent?"

"When you all but admit it, you are." He adjusted his suit jacket, giving Xander a wary, sidelong look. "Let's hear it, then."

Xander sucked in a deep breath and blew it out again. "The Watcher."

The Doctor's face was unreadable. "The Watcher," he said neutrally.

Xander nodded. "The Watcher." It made sense, after a fashion. Out of all the various members of the Scooby Gang, Xander's role most closely identified with Giles'. He was research-boy. He was the one who fetched spell components and jelly donuts and tea and coffee. He was the least of them all, or he was the least of them all.

"Quiet, unassuming, gives the feel of knowledge. It's not bad, I suppose. Can't really say I'm a fan of it, but it's not my title now, is it?" The Doctor grinned affably. "So. The Watcher." He abruptly stuck out his hand. "Pleasure to meet you, Watcher."

Xander smiled and shook the Doctor's hand firmly. "Nice to meet you too, Doctor. Now that we're all properly introduced, would it be impolite to ask a favor?"

"Watcher, old chap, I've asked favors from my mortal enemies before."

Xander remembered some of those occasions fairly clearly. "Yes," he said wryly. "And do you recall how they more or less always turned out?"

"Uncertainty: the spice of life."

"I'd like to borrow the closet."

"What, the one in the TARDIS?"

"The very same."

The Doctor circled him, running a critical eye over his clothing. "Yes," he said. "I can see why. Of course you can. For a price."

Xander sighed. "You're going to make me peer into the Vortex, aren't you?"

Delight spread across the Doctor's face. "It's like you can read my mind. You're not a proper Time Lord until you do, you know. You-" He broke off, eyes narrowed in thought. "Have we already had this argument?"

Xander was tempted to tell him know. "Ten minutes ago," he said instead.

"Ah. Yes. Then it's settled. We'll take a quick spin in the Vortex, indoctrinate you properly into the ranks of the Time Lords, and then you can browse the closet to your heart's content."

Xander smiled weakly, already regretting asking the favor. "Sounds like a plan. Hang on a second, though. What about Rose?"

The Doctor paused, slight confusion touching his forehead. "What about Rose?"

"She went thataway." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Shouldn't we tell her where we're going? See if she wants to come along?"

The Doctor's eyes narrowed again. "No poaching companions," he said, very seriously. "She's mine, and you can't have her. You're just going to have to get your own. Also, you're stalling."

"She worries, you know."

"Ah." The Doctor waved a hand, then took Xander firmly under the arm and began to half-lead and half-drag him towards the police box. "We'll just pop off for a moment and be back in time for tea. That's the wonderful thing about having a box that travels in all space and time; you're never late unless you want to be."

Xander couldn't resist, even as the Doctor all but shoved him into the blue beauty. "You must want to be late a lot then, huh?"

"Oi!"

**oOoOoOo**

Unaware that the Doctor was, once again, haring off on some quick jaunt without her, Rose made her way through the empty halls of the school. She hoped the Doctor and this Xander fellow were getting on; half the time, she thought what was most wrong with the Doctor was the fact that he was alone. Even though she knew as long as he had her, he wasn't truly alone, but that wasn't the same as not being the last survivor of one's entire race.

She chewed on a lock of hair as she wandered aimlessly, worried and hopeful for the meeting of the two Time Lords. Then she chided herself. When all was said and done, she'd either fly with the Doctor in one of his better moods, or she'd pick up the pieces and comfort him if it didn't turn out so well. Until then, though, it was pointless to worry.

The sound of hurried footsteps and heavy breathing behind her spun her around in time to collide with a man who had been too busy looking over his own shoulder to see her in front of him. She slid on her backside into the wall, and the air rushed out of her lungs with a huff. She _hated_having the wind knocked out of her; she always flailed and kicked like a dying fish until she could breathe again.

The man who had knocked her over fell himself, heavily to his hands and knees. While Rose tried frantically to get the wind back into her lungs, she couldn't help but notice that his eyes were wide with terror, face pale and sweating. He scrambled back upright and took off down the hall. More out of habit than anything else, Rose glanced the way he'd come to see what had him running so scared.

She got her breath back just in time to scream.


End file.
